How to monetize your WordPress website with sponsored posts

Tips and best practices for publishing sponsored content

It’s increasingly challenging to monetize your WordPress website or blog these days. For example, ads are packing far less punch than they used to, thanks to banner blindness. Many users won’t see any element that looks like an ad, even if it isn’t one. And that’s to say nothing of the growing popularity of ad blocking plugins. One solution that’s worth looking into: sponsored posts. They are a great way to open up a healthy revenue stream while still maintaining control over your website.

What are sponsored posts?

Sponsored posts are articles that a blogger or website owner is paid to publish on their own sites by companies, businesses, and brands related to that site’s niche or topic.

Sponsored posts can be written by either the site owner/blogger or by the sponsoring brand itself. If you’re hired to write the post as well as publish it on your site, obviously you’ll charge a higher rate than if you’re essentially just renting space on your site.

Sponsored posts can take a variety of formats, such as reviews, summaries of an offer or offers, announcements of a sale, roundup/list posts, product announcements, videos, infographics.

Another good source of sponsors for beginners to build up a portfolio and some experience is local businesses. Identify businesses in your niche who are located near you. If they can’t afford to pay you, you may want to explore some form of bartering. Once you have some experience under your belt, look at partnering with marketing and PR agencies. Form a good relationship with one (or a few), do consistently excellent work, and then you’ll get more work from them in the future.

What should you charge for a sponsored post or review?

Image Source: nattanan23 – Pixabay.com / License: CC0 Public Domain

Finding companies and advertisers is the first step to earn money with sponsored content on your website or blog. However, as even the most cursory Google search will prove, the going rates for sponsored content vary wildly. So how do you begin to know how much to charge for writing and publishing a sponsored post on your own site?

SuccessfulBlogging.com’s post on the subject of fair fees for sponsored blog posts suggests that complicated algorithms may not be the best place to start, especially ones that include PageRank as a factor. Rather, traffic and audience alignment should be bigger concerns for reputable brands (and your writing ability, of course). However, some brands may place more importance on other metrics.

One good place to start is to create a media kit for your website or blog. This is simply a collection of documented information about your blog and its readership, including the major analytical metrics such as unique pageviews and bounce rate. Finally, you can get an idea for going rates by looking for posts such as this Babble roundup of 25 bloggers and what they charge per sponsored post. Then adjust for your relative traffic/readership size and your experience level.

To disclose or not to disclose?

Image Source: succo – Pixabay.com / License: CC0 Public Domain

Publishing paid content to your audience also comes with a legal responsibility. The biggest issue with sponsored posts is whether or not you should disclose that they are, in fact, sponsored posts. In many countries it’s even the law to disclose sponsored content. For U.S. bloggers, the answer is pretty clear: Yes, you should disclose. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission requires it.

If you’re in the U.S. you must include a clear and conspicuous statement with every sponsored post identifying that the post was paid for by the sponsoring brand. While many bloggers and site owners put their disclosures at the end of the post, the disclosures really should be placed at the beginning. The exact wording of the disclosure is up to you. You can even get creative with the disclosures – just don’t make them so creative that they lose all meaning for your readers.

Image Source: Screenshot – ftc.gov

The FTC’s Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking is an interactive guide that explains more about the disclosure requirement, when it applies, and what sufficient disclosures look like. Even if you’re in a jurisdiction where the FTC rule (or something similar) doesn’t apply to you, it’s still a good idea to let your readers know. Your readers could lose trust in you and your brand if they feel that you’ve misled them, even unintentionally.

Best practices for publishing sponsored posts

Image Source: kaboompics – Pixabay.com / License: CC0 Public Domain

As you can see, earning money by publishing sponsored content isn’t rocket science. If you want to start a blog and earn money online, there is some more important advice to consider. Here are a few additional tips and best practices for sponsored posts and paid reviews on your own website or blog:

Add rel=”nofollow” tag to sponsored links. Many agencies (especially SEOs) will try to insist that you do not add this tag. You can certainly comply, but if you do, charge more and also take into consideration that by doing so, you’re risking your own website’s rankings.

Time your publication of sponsored posts carefully. Releasing five sponsored posts in a row will most likely turn off your readership. Create and use a good editorial calendar to avoid this.

Tie the post to your audience. What purpose would the post serve from their perspective? What problem does it solve for them? How does it make their lives easier? If the sponsored post doesn’t help your readers, don’t accept that assignment.

Choose your clients and projects wisely. Niche yourself, develop your own expertise, and be brave enough to turn down any inquiry that doesn’t meet your own criteria.

Add value with high-quality images. This will help justify higher rates across the board. If you can work personal images in – for example you or someone you personally know enjoying the sponsored brand or product – so much the better.

Keep your tone authentic and relatable. You need to hit the sponsor’s major talking points, but try to do it in an organic way. Entertain and educate at the same time, wherever possible.

Monetizing a blog may not be as easy as it used to be, but sponsored posts are still a viable, valid way to add an income stream to your blog or website. Just be smart about the process, follow the best practices, and commit to being transparent with your readers about your sponsored posts. What about you? Have you written sponsored posts? Do you have any tips that we didn’t mention above? Let us know in the comments section below!

I used to display ads on my site, but my income is suffering from ad blockers. So I’m looking for a new form of advertising to monetize my site. I read a lot about content marketing recently and it seems offering paid editorial content is my chance to establish a new revenue stream. Thanks.

Hi, what about social media? If I sell Instagram sponsored posts to companies, how much money can I earn per post? Do you have any Instagram sponsored content examples? I can also offer Facebook sponsored posts. Can I get paid for boosting a post on Facebook?

Hi Jennifer, as with sponsored posts on blogs or sponsored Twitter posts, it all depends on your reach, audience, the number of real followers and interactions on your social channel. You can certainly offer sponsored content on Instagram or Facebook. But how much you can earn really depends on the quality of your channel and the target audience. Think about if your channel offers value to commercial businesses.

You could for example have a look at some successful influencers in the fashion niche. These often are fashion or beauty bloggers / vloggers with a very large targeted audience (often millions of followers). These channels are highly interesting for companies that want to advertise. It’s not uncommon that these very successful influencers earn 4-5 digit payments per post. If you don’t have many followers, the income is much lower of course.

If you want to start sharing sponsored content on social media, try to determine what target audience you have and then contact companies that could potentially be interested in advertisements on your channels. Also make sure that you disclose paid posts on social media as sponsored content. Otherwise your posts may be against the terms of use of the social network or you may even run into legal issues at some point.

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